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Being disabled is quickly becoming the norm instead of the unusual. If you look back at how unusual disability was in 1976 and look around today, you'll be shocked.

When I was in a rehab hospital in 1975 after my spinal surgeries, I was one of two people under the age of 50 who were inpatients. The other was an 18-year-old girl who was the victim of a car accident and had a head injury.

Children with cancers were highly unusual once but have become more ordinary. Think of leukemia and its many varieties. When I was young, cancer was for old people who drank and smoked too much. Kids with cancer were a nightmare that no one wanted to think about.

I had a good friend in high school who developed brain cancer at age 14. She lived about a year and was ostracized by nearly the entire school. A year later another friend developed Hodgkin's. She died within a year, and again she was only whispered about.

Today the number of children with cancer in this country astonishes me. My kids, raised in the Õ80s and Õ90s, knew several kids who had cancer in their classes and many more in the school. We didn't live near high-voltage electric lines or waste dumps. We lived in a good suburban area of Detroit. What was common was the air pollution and crowded classrooms - the normal enemies of life in a big city.

Another thing about our children is the incredible number of kids with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and autism. Before 1980, kids who were high-energy were given extra tasks to tire them out. If they became violent, they were sent to the principal's office. Some were sent home.

I have a brother who was so petrified of one teacher that nearly every day he'd become ill, and I was called out of class to take him home.

Giving children medication to alter their behavior was unheard of. That kind of drastic measure was reserved for older teenagers and adults who were diagnosed as mentally ill. If children had serious problems, like the autistic kids of today, they were rare and usually hospitalized. Some say treatment for such kids now is 100 percent better, but that's not my point.

How and why do we have hundreds of thousands of kids with diseases that were once rare? And how and why did these diseases increase 500 percent to 1,000 percent in just 30 years? What poisons have the industrialized world spewed into our children?

Add up the numbers of children with lifelong disabilities, the baby boomers who are aging, the soldiers of the wars in the Middle East returning with physical and mental disabilities and the rise in poverty, and how in the world will this country support itself?

When you step back and look at America's future, you should be scared. I am.

McKee is a freelance disability writer and producer. E-mail her at chairgrrl@chairgrrl.com